May 5, 2026
Category:
Pay Equity LegislationAuthor:
Adam Seoudi
/
Head of CX
On 4 May, a new legislative package on pay transparency appeared in Poland. The package includes the second Polish draft of the Act implementing the EU Pay Transparency Directive, dated 29 April 2026, together with the explanatory memorandum to the Act. Importantly, it is now also accompanied by a draft regulation setting out the detailed indicators, calculation methods and formulas for the gender pay gap report, as well as a separate explanatory memorandum to that regulation.
We reviewed the most important changes in the new draft and what they may mean for employers preparing for the Polish implementation of the EU Pay Transparency Directive.
As always, the draft is not yet final. However, the direction of travel is becoming much clearer - especially on definitions, job evaluation, reporting thresholds, the treatment of temporary workers and the long-awaited question of whether the 5% trigger for further action applies only when women earn less than men, or also the other way around.
The new draft significantly changes the way several core definitions are framed.
First, the definition of “supplementary or variable components” has been relaxed and shortened. The current wording defines them as all parts of remuneration excluding remuneration resulting from the employee’s personal classification, determined by an hourly or monthly rate.
Second, the definition of “pay level” has been materially expanded. It now refers to annual gross remuneration calculated on the basis of the employee’s actual remuneration received in a given period. The draft also introduces an open catalogue of items that should not be included in actual remuneration for this purpose. In particular, employers should exclude equal cash or in-kind benefits received by all employees, or made available to all employees without any conditions for using them, as well as benefits connected with the termination of employment. The explanatory memorandum also gives important examples: benefits linked to termination, such as severance-type payments, may distort the pay gap picture because they increase the remuneration of employees whose employment ends. In addition, the justification expressly indicates that benefits from the Company Social Benefits Fund should not be included when calculating pay levels.
This is a significant clarification. Employers will not be required to annualise pay levels to a full year. Instead, the employer calculates the pay level for the period actually worked by the employee in the relevant calendar year.
The draft also introduces a new definition of “hourly pay level”. It is calculated as the pay level divided by the nominal working time corresponding to the period of employment. The same logic applies to the hourly level of supplementary or variable components.
This is not a complete surprise: this approach had already appeared in the explanatory materials. But it is now written directly into the statutory definitions, which leaves much less room for interpretation. Nominal working time is defined as the number of working hours resulting from the working time specified in the employment contract. In practice, this points employers away from actual hours worked and towards contract-based nominal hours.
The draft now identifies the equality body as the Commission for Counteracting Discrimination in Employment.
It also introduces “annual work units” as the basis for calculating employment thresholds for pay gap reporting. Annual work units are calculated by taking the number of persons employed by the employer during the calendar year, regardless of working time and length of employment, and converting them into full-time equivalents.
This matters because even short periods of employment count. If an employee worked for only one day in the relevant calendar year, that person may still partially count towards the reporting threshold after conversion into an annual work unit.
The draft maintains the special rules for temporary workers.
The user employer performs the obligations under the Act towards temporary workers. The temporary work agency also performs the obligations connected with the annual information notice and the employee’s individual right to information. To allow the user employer to comply, the agency must promptly provide all necessary information to the user employer.
For reporting thresholds, temporary workers are counted by the user employer using their work. The temporary work agency does not count those same temporary workers towards its own headcount for this purpose.
For employers relying on temporary workers at scale, this is one of the areas that will require early data coordination with agencies.
The new draft further clarifies the job evaluation process.
Employers must evaluate the value of work on a given position. If positions are not separated in the employer’s organisational structure, the employer evaluates the value of the type of work instead.
The draft also clarifies that the criteria listed in the Labour Code are mandatory. The employer must apply the same criteria, and any sub-criteria or additional criteria, to all positions or all types of work. This is intended to prevent selective use of criteria or the use of different criterion sets for different parts of the organisation.
Where a company-level trade union organisation operates, the employer must agree the mandatory criteria, possible sub-criteria and additional criteria with that organisation. If there is more than one trade union organisation, the agreement process involves those organisations; if no agreement with all unions is possible, representative trade unions become relevant.
If the criteria are not agreed within 30 days, the employer may temporarily apply the statutory mandatory criteria, until the agreement process is completed. In that situation, the employer must notify the competent district labour inspector within five days after the deadline for agreement expires, and then again within five days after the agreement process is completed.
There is also a new information obligation: the employer must inform the company-level trade union organisations of the results of the job evaluation within 7 days after it is carried out.
After the job evaluation, the employer classifies positions and establishes employee categories. Where a company-level trade union organisation operates, this is done after consultation. The consultation period must last at least seven days and no longer than 30 days from the date the employer presents the proposed classification and employee categories. If no agreement is reached, the employer makes the classification and establishes the categories independently, after considering the trade unions’ positions.
The draft introduces a dedicated provision on the factors used to determine pay, pay levels and pay progression. These factors must be objective, gender-neutral and free from direct or indirect sex discrimination.
The draft gives examples of progression factors, including skills development, individual achievements and length of service. The list is open, so employers may use other factors, but they will need to be objective, explainable and gender-neutral.
The draft also defines the “pay structure”. It means ordered pay ranges for individual positions or types of work at the employer, resulting in particular from the job evaluation process. The pay structure is also influenced by factors justifying pay differences, including pay progression factors.
This makes the Polish draft more explicit about the link between job evaluation, employee categories, pay ranges and pay progression rules. For employers, the message is clear: pay transparency compliance will not be only a reporting exercise. It will require a defensible pay architecture.
The new draft includes several important clarifications to the employee right to information.
Employees may submit the request in paper or electronic form. The reference period for calculating pay levels is now clearly set as a rolling 12-month period: the 12 months for which remuneration was paid, preceding the month in which the request was submitted.
If the employee receives inaccurate or incomplete information, the employee may request additional, justified explanations and detailed information. The draft now requires the employee to indicate which data, in the employee’s view, need to be supplemented.
The employee may request information personally, through the company-level trade union organisation representing the employee, or through the equality body. If the request is made through a representative body, that body must attach the employee’s consent to act on the employee’s behalf. The employer must respond in writing, in paper or electronic form, without undue delay and no later than 30 days after the request is submitted.
The draft also broadens the permitted purpose for using the information. The earlier focus was narrower and linked to equal pay between women and men. The current wording refers more broadly to exercising rights arising from the principle of equal treatment in employment.
The main reporting deadline remains 31 March.
Employers with at least 100 employees prepare a gender pay gap report. Employers with at least 250 employees report annually, while employers with at least 100 employees report every three years. Employers below 100 employees may report voluntarily.
The report must include the overall gender pay gap, the gender pay gap for supplementary or variable components, median gaps, the percentage of women and men receiving supplementary or variable components, the percentage of women and men in each pay quartile, and category-level pay gap information.
Where a company-level trade union organisation operates, the reliability of the report must be confirmed after consultation with the union organisation or organisations. The draft gives a maximum of 14 days for this consultation from the date the report is prepared.
The reporting threshold is based on annual work units. Temporary workers are counted by the user employer and are not counted by the agency for its own threshold calculation. Because annual work units are calculated by reference to actual periods of employment, even employees who worked only part of the year, or even a very short period, affect the threshold on a pro-rated basis.
The draft regulation is one of the most important additions to the new package. It sets out the detailed indicators, the calculation method and the formulas for the pay gap report.
The key point: the Polish draft regulation keeps the formula in which the average pay of women is subtracted from the average pay of men in the opposite direction to the Eurostat formula. In the Polish draft, the annual gender pay gap is calculated as:
average pay level of women minus average pay level of men, divided by average pay level of men, multiplied by 100%.
This means that the sign of the Polish pay gap will be the reverse of the currently used Eurostat approach, where the numerator is the difference between men’s average gross hourly earnings and women’s average gross hourly earnings, expressed as a percentage of men’s average gross hourly earnings.
This may be one reason why the draft Act now expressly refers to the absolute value of the pay gap in the 5% trigger provisions.
This is probably the most important practical change in the new Polish draft.
The draft confirms that the 5% pay gap threshold is assessed in absolute value. In other words, the trigger applies regardless of direction. It is not limited to situations where women earn less than men. A category-level gap of at least 5% may trigger the next steps whether the gap is negative or positive.
This is a major clarification. Until now, many discussions assumed that the 5% trigger might apply only where women were paid less. The new Polish draft removes that ambiguity.
If the report shows a gender pay gap of at least 5% in absolute value in any employee category, and that gap is not justified by objective, gender-neutral criteria, the employer must take effective remedial action by 30 September of the calendar year in which the report was submitted.
The draft also keeps the requirement that the justification of the pay gap must be agreed with the trade unions. However, the earlier requirement to agree the effective remedial actions appears to have been removed. Under the current draft, the employer informs the trade union organisations about the effective remedial actions taken.
The draft also confirms a separate mechanism for additional explanations and remedial action. If authorised parties request additional, detailed explanations regarding the pay gap report, the employer must respond within 30 days.
If those explanations show that any gender-based pay difference is not justified by objective, gender-neutral criteria, the employer must take effective remedial action even where the difference is below the 5% joint pay assessment trigger.
This is an important clarification. Employers should not treat gaps below 5% as automatically irrelevant. The 5% threshold matters for the joint pay assessment mechanism, but unjustified gender-based pay differences may still require explanation and remediation through a separate route.
The new draft also clarifies the timing of the joint pay assessment.
A joint pay assessment is required if three conditions are met: the report shows a gender pay gap of at least 5% in absolute value in any employee category, the employer has not justified the gap using objective, gender-neutral criteria, and the employer has not taken effective remedial action by 30 September.
The verification of these conditions should take place by 31 October. The joint pay assessment must then be completed by 30 November of the year in which the pay gap report was submitted. In practice, this means the process may be relatively compressed: depending on when the trigger is confirmed, the joint assessment may last around one month, and at most around two months after the 30 September remedial action deadline.
The draft also extends the deadline for taking effective remedial action after the joint pay assessment. The employer must take effective remedial action within no more than 10 months from the date the information from the joint pay assessment is provided. This is longer than the earlier eight-month period.
If no company-level trade union organisation operates at the employer, the relevant union functions in the joint pay assessment process are performed by employee representatives elected in the manner adopted by that employer.
The draft includes detailed rules for situations where information provided under the employee right to information, reporting obligations or joint pay assessment would directly or indirectly reveal the remuneration of an identifiable employee.
In those cases, the information is not automatically provided to the employee in a way that would disclose individual pay. Instead, it may be provided at the employee’s request and with the employee’s consent to the equality body, the trade union organisation representing the employee, or, where applicable, employee representatives. Those bodies then advise the employee on potential claims without revealing the actual pay levels of identifiable employees.
This is a practically important balance between pay transparency and personal data protection. Employers will need a process for identifying when aggregated data could reveal individual pay, especially in small employee categories.
The draft changes the penalty range. A person who is an employer or acts on behalf of the employer and violates the listed obligations may be fined from PLN 2,000 to PLN 60,000.
This covers a broad set of obligations, including job evaluation, agreement of criteria, classification of positions and employee categories, pay progression factors, employee information rights, reporting obligations, joint pay assessment duties and information safeguards.
The draft provides that the Act will enter into force six months after publication.
This creates a practical timing issue. If the Act is not published by around the end of June 2026, entry into force in 2026 becomes unlikely. Given that the Act still needs to pass through Parliament and be signed by the President, there is a real possibility that the effective date could move into the first quarter of 2027.
At the same time, the current transitional provision says that employers with at least 150 employees should submit the first pay gap report by 7 June 2027, covering the period from the date the Act enters into force until the end of the calendar year in which it enters into force.
That provision appears to assume that the Act enters into force in 2026. If the Act enters into force only in 2027, the first-reporting timeline may need clarification or amendment, because the reporting period would not have ended before the 7 June 2027 deadline.
For now, employers should treat the first reporting date as a moving target and monitor the legislative process closely.
The second Polish draft is more detailed and more operational than the earlier version. It also confirms several issues that employers were already modelling in practice: actual remuneration, no full-year standardisation of annual pay levels, nominal working time for hourly calculations, annual work units for thresholds, and the absolute-value interpretation of the 5% trigger.
For employers, the preparation work should now focus on five areas:
The new draft confirms that pay transparency compliance in Poland will be much more than a once-a-year report. It will require a structured, evidence-based pay system that employers can explain to employees, unions, regulators and, if needed, courts.
